Jo lives in a small town in southern Japan. She lives with her two children and Japanese husband and is learning more everyday about the world of Japanese agriculture and culture.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Diversity

I've just arrived home after running a 2 day leadership camp for 19 university students. They in turn will have to lead a camp for 88 university students so I was responsible for getting them to know each other, creating an environment where they felt comfortable working together and getting them to really start to think about what is important as leaders. I enjoy this kind of work more than teaching English as you can have conversations that go a little further than.. Hello, my name is Jo, what's your name? How are you? I'm fine thank you. Nice to meet you!

The thing that makes this program even more interesting is that it is at an international university and there were 11 different nationalities within the group of 19 students. It makes for lots of mis-communications, lots of strange gesturing and all in all a lot of fun! It is often a real eye-opener for Japanese students as they are often not used to doing in-depth debriefings, having "arguments" during meetings and really letting go of their inhibitions to make fools of themselves. It will be interesting to see if they remember any of my incredible pieces of advice and make a great camp.... or ignore my advice completely and make an even better camp!

2 comments:

Hi Jo, are you also an English teacher or is it one of your part-time jobs? I'm also an English teacher for Japanese students and I enjoy looking at your blog posts about the Japanese culture. Nice posts! :)